Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will recall that the SOPA hearings earlier this week 'excluded any witnesses who advocate for civil rights. Google's Katherine Oyama was the only witness to object to the bill in a meaningful way.' So to get the attention of lawmakers, new media giants Google, Facebook, and Zynga turned to the only place they knew that politicians gather daily. They took out a full page ad in the New York Times. The irony of taking out a newspaper ad to protect the Web is certainly lost on no one."

Or you could get together with 87,834 of your closest friends and call them [tumblr.com].

It's good to see people mobilisation en masse to oppose this bill, but as others have said [google.com], it remains to be seen whether Congress will listen to anyone unless they dangle a cheque in front of their nose.

The big danger that I see [imagicity.com] is how dangerously regressive and backward-looking attitudes on the Hill are.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the recent House Judiciary Committee hearing was that Google, the sole opponent to the legislation allowed to present at the hearing, was castigated by most of the people there, impugned for purportedly profiting from piracy and cast as the villain in this whole affair.

Seeing one of the few growing and dynamic drivers of the information economy not only cast out of the fold but actively opposed, one can only conclude that the captains of the US media industry are perfectly content to cut their nose off to spite their face. They will burn the bridge represented by Google rather than cross it.

I see two immediate dangers if this regime is actually allowed to take the shape proposed for it:

1) Innovation in content re-use and sharing will move outside of the US. Some will move into the shadows (kind of like offshore pirate radio in days of yore, except the ships and radios are available for the cost of a laptop). Some will move into the less governed – or governable – areas.

2) US influence on innovation and invention will decline significantly. This legislative package will serve as a clear signal that Silicon Valley is no longer the influence it used to be. (Indeed, the Valley’s lack of standing in DC was evidenced by committee members’ contempt for Google throughout the hearing.)

The latter outcome is the more dangerous of the two. Losing influence in the direction the Internet’s development takes also means losing the uniquely American ethos of freedom and individualism.

There are numerous new media and technological players poised in the wings right now. But few of them (with the possible exception of Al Jazeera) have any moral stake in human rights or even individual expression. Not, at least, in the same way that many American developers do - that is, at the axiomatic level, rather than as a conscious overlay to their world view.

There will always be something of a generational gap in politics - just as there will be in judges, or the higher ranks of military command. These are all long-term careers, where it takes decades to work your way through the ranks and make it to the top. There may be a few who manage to get ahead fast, but even Obama is fifty now. So none of those in congress grew up with computers or really understand those who did. They do understand lobbying, and economics - so for them, it's a very simply matter: Entertainment production is one of the few industries where the US not only leads the world, but also exports a lot more than it imports. That makes it economically very valuable, and so it must be defended and strengthened.

How old was Dennis Ritchie when he died just recently? WELL above 50. If you are 40 then computers were a part of your childhood.

Anyway, when recorded music was itself new, it didn't need long at all to be understood by politics and have the current copyright introduced. It is about the maturity in the industry as in knowing how the game is played (bribes). Google just doesn't get it.

This ad is a good example. Wall of text rather then a heart-warming story of innocent and pure-blooded American Google being bastarized by the evil japanse Sony music.

Nonsense. If you are 40 then you were born in 1970. Home computing started to appear in the very late '70s, but didn't become common until the '90s. I'm just under 30, and at least half of the people I knew growing up didn't have a home computer. When I came to university, a lot of my friends didn't have their own computer (well, all of my geek friends did). I bought the computer I took to university with money from a summer job, and it cost about as much as four months rent in student accommodation. People who had to work a part-time job to afford the rent certainly couldn't afford one.

It would be more accurate to say 'if you are 40, middle class, and from a family with a technical background who thought computers were important, then computers were a part of your childhood'. If you were poor, they were not. If your parents didn't think computers were important, they were not.

Just nit-picking here, but he did not actually mention "home computers" or "personal computers"; he just said "computers".

Access to other computers is even rarer. Schools typically didn't have them at all, universities did but access was limited to a science and engineering students. If you didn't encounter a computer until you arrived at university, then you can hardly be said to grow up with them.

I'm in my 50s, and I have used computers since my teens

I'm in my 20s and can dance argentine tango, but neither of these facts lets you extrapolate to the general population. A few people in their '40s and '50s grew up using computers, but most did not.

So none of those in congress grew up with computers or really understand those who did.

You don't have to grow up with a thing to understand it. I didn't grow up with computers, computers grew up with me. [kuro5hin.org] Yes, since I'm a nerd I had a computer in 1982 when I could finally afford a cheap one, but computers and the internet have been pretty much a part of most people's lives for over a decade now. Most of today's geezers are every bit as comfortable with computers as you kids are.

I think he is saying that there is more to this world than USA, and by allowing SOPA and PROTECT IP, USA will effectively isolate themselves from the rest of the world.

This in turn means that USA won't benefit from what Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the rest of the world invents, which means the rest of the world will outrun USA when it comes to technology. In fifty years USA will still be stuck with 2010 tech while Europe etc will have 2060 tech. Both SOPA and PROTECT IP will drag down USA in the mud. Shame, really, since the US had some really great things going for it...

In the starting days of the automobile, the horse farmers and buggy whip manufacturers managed to come up with all sorts of insane fucking laws. For instance, these [trafficticketsecrets.com]. In a few states, you had to have a flagman walk in front of your car (yes WALK) waving a flag and beeping a horn to "warn" drivers of horse-drawn carriages that one of these crazy horseless contraptions was coming through.

Eventually, good sense prevailed, and the buggy whip manufacturers fell to their proper place in history... but some of these crazy stupid laws remain on the books, just unenforced.

Likewise, we'll probably see the same thing happen here. "Piracy", as the MafiAA goons tell it, is killing their ability to rip off artists of money. Sooner or later, the artists will find a way to make money that doesn't involve the goons and the illegal MafiAA price-fixing monopolies. It's already starting to happen. "Piracy" is also, thanks to fucked up copyright laws, becoming the only way to preserve our digital history; in the meantime, plenty has been lost, such as software for the Cray-1 [chrisfenton.com] that wasn't preserved and that can't be run on other platforms. The Apple II/e library is preserved only because "pirates" have preserved most of it and crafted emulation for it. Similar for most of the early Commodore computers, the Atari lines... DosBox almost REQUIRES that you have "pirate" software that ran on 5 1/4" disk in order to run it (e.g. "copy the disk") for some of the oldest stuff it runs, but modern computers don't even have the connections required to attach an actual 5 1/4" disk even if you could find media that hasn't succumbed to bit-rot.

It's impossible to say that copyright is meaningful when so much of "copyrighted" products today is covered by a law that lasts 100x longer than the expected platform lifespan. That's just ridiculous on the face of it and deliberately breaks the contract between copyright holders and society, which is that the copyrighted work WILL enter the public domain as repayment to the public for the grant of LIMITED duration monopoly.

But it still doesn't really matter much when the only realistic choices for office are chosen for us ahead of time by the kingmakers at the GOP and DNC.

Yes, I know that anyone can technically run for office, but we all know that the only way to compete with the GOP and the DNC is to have their monetary resources so as to plaster your face and message on every billboard and television screen and radio within your voting district. I actually follow politics pretty closely in my corner of the country and every time there's a vote there are still people on the ballot I've never even heard of, have no website, have no information about them or their platforms at all.

Plus, after Nader cost Gore the election in 2000 and we ended up with that idiot George W. Bush as President a lot of people started really voting for the lesser of two evils in earnest. What other choice do the people have? Support a fringe candidate that is just not going to win, period? Or throw your hat in with the guy you disagree with the least that may actually win the election?

I say this, of course, because I'm sitting here wondering what the hell I'm going to do in 2012. I'm severely pissed off at Obama for all the campaign promises he reneged on (Gitmo, the wars, campaign reform, regulatory reform...I could go on and on and on) but what am I supposed to do if he's up against someone like Michele Bachmann or Rick Santorum, that want to roll back civil rights to the 50's and start throwing gays into reeducation centers? I can vote for a third party, but we all know that is throwing your vote away, especially as regards a Presidential Election. Ross Perot and Ralph Nader got a whopping 18.9% and 2.7% of the popular vote, respectively. [wikipedia.org] Neither won any electoral votes at all. You have to go back 100 years to the election of 1912 to find a third party candidate that got more than 20% of the vote, and that was Teddy fucking Roosevelt, one of the greatest President's this country has ever had in history, beloved by almost everyone. He managed to get a whole 27% of the vote running under the Bull Moose party, and this is one of four people on Mount Rushmore for Christ's sake...

So what do I do? Vote my conscience and throw my vote away on a third party? Or do my part to try and make sure that we don't turn into a fucking Christian Theocracy where abortion is murder, even in cases of rape, vaccines cause autism and are therefore banned, no mosques within 1000 feet of a government building, ridiculous shit like that? I'm heartily sick of voting for the lesser of two evils, but short of pulling an Egypt and overthrowing our government, I see no other recourse. We need to sever the ties between wealth and politics in this country, but I see no legal way to do so. There won't ever be one, there is no incentive for any of our sitting reps to change these things, and the only way one can even achieve these offices is by allowing yourself to be corrupted by this system in the first place.

So what do we do? Seriously, someone tell me how the hell we can solve these problems without plunging our country into anarchy, because I just see no other way at all...

I can vote for a third party, but we all know that is throwing your vote away, especially as regards a Presidential Election.

That's exactly what the two parties want you to think. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy if you get enough people to decide not to "throw their vote away".

If, instead, everyone always voted their choice, you limit the amount of crap that major party candidates can keep doing after being elected, as all it takes is for a third-party candidate will win one state before real fear will set in for the major parties.

Go for broke, I say. Get Facebook, Wiki(m|p)edia, Youtube, and Twitter to go dark for a day. Hell, they could go dark for an hour and still the world would riot. I don't like how integral these sites have become to day-to-day life for most people, when ten years ago none even existed,[1] but for Congress to think that the people in this country or this world care one iota about "e-parasites" when put up against Honey Badger [youtube.com] and Farmville is just bogus. Show Washington what this bill actually means for America and they'll all change. You can't get reelected on "I voted to shut down Facebook and Youtube."

1. Okay fine, Wikipedia was around, but few knew about it. Besides, it's for the sake of the narrative!

Nope, for the whole of America replace the page with a short notice saying that US politicians are attempting to pass laws making it easy to censor the Internet and making this kind of downtime common and provide a list of telephone numbers for the offices of all of the denizens of congress. Let the congressional switchboard be jammed with constituents' complaints for an hour or so...

You are thinking too small. To be truly effective, each of these sites should have a total blackout for one day. Coordinate, and choose one day that they actively refuse every connection made to any of their servers. 24 house for the entire world to see what it will be like to have no Google, no YouTube, No Gmail, no Facebook, No Zynga (kinda redundant with no Facebook, I know...) Heck, cut off all those useful Android utilities while you are at it.

24 hours worth of profits to most of these companies is chump change... 24 hours of profits lost by those other companies who rely on these services though would make a huge impact. One that could not be ignored.

Why target the whole world? It's the US government that is trying to pass the laws. Hindering billions of other people is only going to anger users. Also, although I can see why a total block would be effective, killing services that other companies rely on (like google maps) would be a major business mistake. Drop everything social / search or media related and you'll achieve 99% as much.

Also because applying pressure from several billion, or at the least, several hundred million people from around the globe is a hell of a lot more of a statement than applying pressure from a few million. These jackasses in the capital need to understand that the internet is not US domain, that it is worldwide and that what they do with laws regarding the internet will have repercussions world wide. When they are shutting down on-line businesses willy-nilly in the US because of laws like this, and they all start moving out of the country, they [congress] will start to understand. Shit, I'd love it if the big tech companies (Google, M$, Apple, Facebook et al) threatened to pick up and move to Canada/Mexico/China.

No they don't. Their staffers take care of their representation on Facebook and the like. Ted Stevens represented the most knowledgeable politician with respect to the Internet.

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
[] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

No they don't. Their staffers take care of their representation on Facebook and the like. Ted Stevens represented the most knowledgeable politician with respect to the Internet.

Nonsense. Patrick Leahy [senate.gov] of Vermont is probably the most Internet-saavy politician currently in office (even though he's pretty much a tool of the RIAA/MPAA IP cabal). Going back to the 80's and early 90's, you had Al Gore of Tennessee, and even Conrad Burns of Montana was knowledgeable enough to co-sponsor (with Leahy) a bill to overturn Clinton-era restrictions on cryptography strength for American consumer products.

You may have been trying to be funny. If so, the joke fell flat enough that you got modded

Imagine if Google/Facebook blocked congressional IP blocks for a day. That would be a POWERFUL move. All of congress and even the white house use facebook and other social media as a primary medium to pump out their bullshit into the mouths of the masses each day. They would quickly realize that these companies have to much power and the sleeping giant would awake to crush them.

Call me the prophet if you will (hopefully a bad one at that). Here's how I think it's going down. The president of the United States and all of congress is basically going to tell Silicon Valley to go fuck off. Their technology robs government of power and exposes their dirty laundry to the public consistently. That's a big "no no". Second, Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry has always been involved in US politics far longer than I've been alive. They also export their media to be consumed, not to be interactive thus providing entertaining feedback to other citizens. To allow for that robs them of a time-slice in peoples lives that could otherwise be revenue generating. You know as well as I that the gaming industry and hollywood are in direct competition with each other. Expect gaming to be heavily regulated under the guise of "addition"

In there's the bottom line. To have the RIAA and MPAA cartels wither on the vine would be a national security issue. That's how it will be spun. Being a huge export of America and all and our massive debt that needs to be paired off. So, they will subsidize the industry in one of three ways. 1: Tax breaks, 2: direct subsidies, 3: put the burden of cost on all other industries to enforce the media industry (laundered tax on citizens).

Easy solution. Hollywood is great at lobbying. So the tech industry should just -buy- Hollywood. After all, the entirety of Hollywood would cost the big tech giants little really. Split it up, each tech giant can buy a studio, and just straight up fire the entire executive staff. Then going forward the media industry can lobby in a tech friendly manner.

It is not just about money paying for corruption of politics via lobbying it is about censoring and silencing the voices of opposition. It was visible in the attack upon OWS when cities around the US coordinated their attack upon the OWS movement via the Federal government.

The US government knows full well it works in opposition to the wishes of the majority, it has known that for that last thirty years, which is why corporate controlled mass media worked so hard at silencing the voices of the majority whilst pretending the corporate marketing voice was the voice of the majority.

The problem is we have allowed psychopaths and narcissist to gain control of major corporations and the government, these people will not let go the levers of power without a fight, a destructive fight which they will orchestrate.

The only place to tackle this mess is in the US primaries, the active will of the OWS movement to replace corporate stooges with representatives of the people. First step fight people to apply and start openly and publicly testing them. Test their health, intelligence, knowledge and most important of all their psychological state.

"The President of the United States and all of Congress is basically going to tell Silicon Valley to go fuck off."

He will get a very unpleasant surprise on the next fund-raising trip if he tries that.

He'll have more than enough money to beat the yahoos on the other side. And even if he signs SOPA, I'll still vote for him, only because I know the fascist on the other side would have signed SOPA *and* reinstated Don't Ask Don't Tell.

That's one of the reasons I kind of hope it does pass initially it will cause a lot of problems (technical and otherwise). But we'll have to come up with solutions to those problems and when they really want to censor us it will be a lot more difficult. Where as if it doesn't pass it will likely be replaced shortly by more reasonable and enforceable means of censorship. At least right now we have some big players (like Google) who's interest happen to align with the people. Then again maybe I'm just a being

That's one of the reasons I kind of hope it does pass initially it will cause a lot of problems (technical and otherwise). But we'll have to come up with solutions to those problems and when they really want to censor us it will be a lot more difficult. Where as if it doesn't pass it will likely be replaced shortly by more reasonable and enforceable means of censorship.

I think that's actually a bit too optimistic. What Hollywood, "traditional media", Politicians and associated Moneypolists want is to turn the web into Television. They want a one-way medium to distribute their content, whether it be entertainment, political platform or other stuff they sell. They don't want the regular Joe to generate their own content, hence the extremes they go to brand anything not made by them as spurious and pirated.

If this law was to remain, it would cement their grip on the medium so they can turn it into the advertisement broadcast platform they want it to be: sanitized, monetized and sales-orientated. They want to know who you are and where you are so you can't dodge them; they want you to be a trapped consumer, and they want to keep tabs on you to better tailor their efforts at shovelling their crap down your throat. This is why that MoFo Murdoch (or was it Turner?) said the Internet should have been patented from the start. This is why politicians and law enforcement agencies everywhere want it muzzled, they don't want disent they want obedience and mindless consumerism.

I think that's actually a bit too optimistic. What Hollywood, "traditional media", Politicians and associated Moneypolists want is to turn the web into Television. They want a one-way medium to distribute their content, whether it be entertainment, political platform or other stuff they sell. They don't want the regular Joe to generate their own content, hence the extremes they go to brand anything not made by them as spurious and pirated.

If this law was to remain, it would cement their grip on the medium so they can turn it into the advertisement broadcast platform they want it to be: sanitized, monetized and sales-orientated. They want to know who you are and where you are so you can't dodge them; they want you to be a trapped consumer, and they want to keep tabs on you to better tailor their efforts at shovelling their crap down your throat. This is why that MoFo Murdoch (or was it Turner?) said the Internet should have been patented from the start. This is why politicians and law enforcement agencies everywhere want it muzzled, they don't want disent they want obedience and mindless consumerism.

And I want a pony. I think they will find putting the cat back in the bag to be more of a problem than they think. Especially, since we no longer have a real interest in the bag...

But think of all of those cat-bag makers that will be put out of work! I say we need to pass a law requiring all cats to be in not one, but two bags!!!! Any bag-less cat is a lost sale and lost sales are unamerican!

If this law was to remain, the USA as a superpower would be history for sure. Most of the rest of the world would distance themselves from the USA and say "You know what, fine. We're not interested in your shit anymore." Isolation makes it very hard to ignore.

And yeah, nukes? You seriously believe they'll fire nukes at us for refusing to take their shit? All that would do would serve to alienate us non-US:ers even more. It would be both counter-productive and stupid. Control by fear is never as effective as

Its three needlessly long paragraphs reiterating what was said in the summary and contains links or scans to the ad in question. How did something like this get voted to the front page?

If you're going to link to a site talking about it, at least link to a site that has the ad! [boingboing.net] Two seconds with Google people, was that really all that hard? I just wish these guys would have mentioned in the ad the combined net worth of all their companies and contrasted it to the net worth of the media empires trying to ram this shit through. Would have really gotten people talking and asking the hard questions.

Yes the piece in ITWorld [itworld.com] seemed like an introduction instead of a real article. Ridiculous! It was also written by some dyslectic teenager: read the last sentence! I can't take ITWorld seriously after having read that piece of trash.

I love how the ad tacks on "and job creation" in several places.Good to know atleast the "buzzword inserter" hasn't lost his job."Job creation"... It's always fun to see a corporation twist a necessity of business into an act of kindness.

Instead of taking out a newspaper ad, the "new media giants" should take a page out of the unions' book and go on strike. No Google. No Facebook. No YouTube. Just put up a static page all day explaining the threat this law poses to new media. That would get people's attention.

Maybe that's plan B. It's usually better to start small with methods of persuasion, rather than just bringing out the big guns right away.

Remember, most Google, Facebook, and YouTube users don't know squat about SOPA and have never heard of it; they don't read Slashdot. Shutting down these sites all of a sudden over an issue that no one's heard of is only going to create a lot of anger. Don't forget, Google has an active competitor called Bing that people could easily switch to, and it's backed by a company that's probably A-OK with SOPA. The last thing Google needs is to cause most of their users to switch to Bing during a brief "strike", and then never return.

Zygna has been embroiled at least once for outright stealing of graphical assets from other commercial games companies.

I am not saying to look the gift horse in the mouth here-- if it gets our dumbass leaders to shelve their onerous legislation and bury it at sea without honors, I am all for it, but I draw the line at saying these corporations represent *MY* interests.

It's called "enlightened self interest" and it's how capitalism should always work. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

Thank goodness we've had government in there neck-deep attempting to "social engineer" the economy and society since the 1930s with taxes, legislation, and regulation into a Progressive Utopia.

Worked out well, hasn't it?

But don't complain when it does, as society as a whole benefits.

Yes, society does benefit greatly when enlightened self-interest, through capitalism, works. It's what has created the highest living standards and levels of individual freedom humans have ever known, and for more people over a longer time, than anything else ever tried.

Yes, society does benefit greatly when enlightened self-interest, through capitalism, works. It's what has created the highest living standards and levels of individual freedom humans have ever known, and for more people over a longer time, than anything else ever tried.

But, on the other hand, the best average standard and happiness comes through balancing capitalism with socialism in a democracy. And your US freedoms are quickly eroding.

No, capitalism works to funnel money into ever fewer hands. Capitalism wants real freedom for the richest. Damn the consequences for anyone else.

What really is good for a society is democracy and education. These are not automatically provided by capitalism.

Even if capitalism could be said to have been the shit for a period in history, it's not doing us much more good now. The US is in a sorry state, humanity-wise and freedom-wise.

Thank you capitalism for all the burgers and denim and rock 'n' roll, but onwards from here democratic socialism is the way to go.

This is a bit less bad than it seems -- the summary cherry-picked certain companies and groups. Mozilla and Twitter are also signatories to the "letter". I agree that Facebook and Zynga are stereotypical "bad guys" -- however, you don't always need to agree 100% with your allies.

The fact is that "creators" are pretty passive about this law, hovering from moderately for to moderately against, but they have nothing like the sort of passion you see around these parts. Here's a forum I read [gearslutz.com], everyone here is a recording engineer or sound designer in feature film, television and ads -- the original poster is a professional associate of mine. Most are pro-SOPA, because they see anyone who's vocally against it as objectively pro-turnstyle-jumping, and the people that are against are pretty measured, they never invoke fundamental human rights, and the focus on the practicality.

The fact is, if SOPA passes, the winners are Sony Pictures Distribution, Buena Vista Entertainment, and MTV Networks. If SOPA fails, the winners are Google, Facebook and Yahoo; either way, the biggest winners are middlemen. The anti-SOPA corporations would have you believe that SOPA is about squelching new art forms and creative channels, but it's really about making the advertising, aggregation, and monetization of new channels more or less practical, nothing more or less.

Content creators just sell there stuff one way or the other, and the practical ways off containing illicit copying are evolving. I'd personally much rather content creators continue to get their share of the box office, and they get a cut of all the ad and anciliary revenues as they do now. If Google and Facebook win, the ad revenues all walk out the door through the new middlemen, and maybe Google will give artists a 70% cut of some first (and really last) sale, but Google's going to use their data and aggregations thereof a hundred times over to make new applications, offer new services and SELL ADS, all of which will make them money. At least when somebody like Peter Jackson does a deal with New Line, New Line doesn't cut him off at a share of the box office, and then take no action to prevent people from xeroxing their ticket stubs.

where can I buy that then? or you mean embedding avatars as recommenders on pages they click yes this is cool?

of course they represent their own interests. point is that after this law your own facebook page could just disappear because someone just says that you're a look-a-like of marlon brando and therefore stepping on their interests (or facebook would disappear).

The point was that while I am happy that these agencies are voicing opposition (and because they are big corps, which is all capital hill seems willing to listen to these days, such opposition is well received), I was merely pointing out that the reasons for which they are voicing that opposition are not the same reasons that little people like you or I are opposed to it.

An ad opposing legislation posted in the New York Times strikes me, at least, as posturing to the media. After all, Congress is located in Washington DC. An ad in the Washington Post would be much more likely to be read by the Congressperson him/herself. If they were serious about this, the ad should have appeared in the Washington Post and probably LA Times, too.

Because the ad is aimed less at politicians are more at people in general. If the new media companies were going to try to appeal to politicians directly, they wouldn't use a newspaper ad. It would be lunacy to try to, since the **AAs have far deeper hooks into US politics than Google and co. So instead, they are trying to increase public awareness in a gambit to create a public backlash against SOPA.

For starters, when you run a nationwide full page political ad, you traditionally do it in the NYT. Sort of like when you give a civil rights speech, you do it on the steps on the Lincoln memorial. Second, there are two nationwide newspapers - USA Today and the New York Times. USA Today has a higher distribution due to hotels and whatnot, but NYT is a paper people actually pay for and read.

So I use Microsoft windows, and adobe flash, I think that is the only two products from anyone on the list I use. I don't know who a lot of those companies even are. It doesn't surprise me to see apple or Microsoft on there though.

If I had to guess, despite the summary's "irony of taking out a newspaper ad to protect the Web" being "lost on no one", that the irony will be lost on the RIAA, the MPAA, Righthaven, LLC, and most members of Congress.

Considering how disconnected politicians and lawmakers are from technology issues in general, i think it's a fairly good idea to post the ad in a newspaper. Seems to me this bill should be stopped with all means available...

Google and Facebook can drop the politicians who support this bill from their respective sites....completely. Sorry, Congressman, you don't turn up in search any more, no Facebook page. Oh, and that email to your constituents? Sorry, gmail doesn't recognize your account.

If these guys want to make a statement, they should disconnect the user accounts of all politicians who support SOPA. I'm sure it's within their ludicrously one-sided ToSs to exclude members at a whim (and it's legal as long as it's not discrimination). It'd be a nice reminder about what life would be like without these tech services.

I think the political backlash would be to big for them to take that risk, however it would be very good for most people.

Which is why these sites should block everyone for 24 hours. Replace their homepage with a short paragraph explaining why, a link to the article for those who want to read it, and a link to a writeyourcongresscritter.com style site. Maybe even a list of phone numbers for the offices of the supporters.

If the new media companies like google and facebook don't like what the government is planning threaten to de-invest in the USA. By that I mean start moving jobs, charity work, headquarters overseas to someplace with reasonable laws. I promise that a full page ad in the New York times about the issue will generate less controversy than headlines reading:

Simply use SOPA against SOPA supporters. Claim copyright ownership of the websites of Senators and Representatives who voted for it, of the lobbying groups who supported it, especially all prominent individual members who supported it.

Do this for every public message they try to get out, wherever they post. If & once a claim is rejected, another person comes along to claim copyright ownership and restart the process.

I don't think that many people will complain about corporations buying ads in newspapers to get their point out. How is it really any different from advertising? Except that while still trying to sway your opinion with their ad, they're not trying to sell you anything.

The problem with corporate "speech" is not when they spend a bunch of money on ads, it's when they hand bags of money to politicians and call them "campaign contributions". Somehow the SCOTUS equate giving money to someone as "speech", which it's not, it's a bribe. With these ads, there's zero money going from the corporations to the politicians; only the newspaper is getting any money, and we can presume they charge the same rates for these ads as they'd charge anyone else for that same ad space.

The problem with corporate "speech" is not when they spend a bunch of money on ads, it's when they hand bags of money to politicians and call them "campaign contributions". Somehow the SCOTUS equate giving money to someone as "speech", which it's not, it's a bribe.

Are you sure about that? I think Citizens United was more about the first one than the second one.

The concern is that advertising sets the tone for a campaign. If a specific candidate supports SOPA and world+dog outside of Hollywood (including the candidate's district) opposes it, advertising that fact will cause the candidate to lose votes. And there will be issues of that nature for any candidate, which de facto allows corporations to crush anyone they don't like merely by bringing up the specific issues

I'm sorry, I don't see the problem. If the issue really is unpopular, and the corporations merely point out the candidate's stand on the issue, then what's the problem? As long as they're not committing libel, it's fine. Otherwise, how are you supposed to know the candidate's stand? Listen to the candidate's own paid advertisements? Listen to the biased media? Listen to political action groups' paid ads? Oh wait, how is a PAC (which isn't a person either) different from a corporation? It's not.

The problem is that if you can choose the issues that get media attention then you can choose the winner. As between a candidate that agrees with the majority of a district on 80% of the important issues vs. one that agrees on substantially fewer, you would expect the first candidate to win. But if you throw ten million dollars behind a campaign to bring the the remaining 20% of issues to the forefront of the debate, you cause the "better" candidate to lose. Which you can do merely because you disagree with the candidate on one of the issues for which that candidate agrees with the majority of the district, if you have a big enough pile of money.

You don't even have to find issues where the candidate disagrees with the majority. If the majority of the district supports strong measures against illegal immigration and so does the candidate, but 80% of Spanish-speaking constituents strongly oppose those measures, you run ads describing the candidate's position in Spanish. If the candidate is pro choice, you run ads on religious TV networks. If the candidate is pro life, you run ads on liberal women's networks. If the candidate opposes further unfunded increases in Medicare benefits, you put ads in AARP publications, etc.

It's easy to destroy an honest candidate by telling the truth in inconvenient places.

No, it's the other way around. The problem is that corporations have more money, so they can buy more speech than the actual candidates. The answer to speech is more speech, so the answer to money is more money. Public financing of elections.

Probably the best way to do it is some kind of anti-matching funds system, where every dollar someone spends against you means that you get an extra dollar of public financing so that you can answer the attack. (I'm not sure whether that is constitutional under the exis

Wait wait wait - you're asking why everyone has a problem with corporate-sponsored political ads, then go through the laundry list of issues of information sources that can't possibly be more biased, but are at least nominally supposed to be less biased?

Here's the second part: when they're putting out ads that are 100% match of a candidates position, it doesn't matter whether that they're not directly giving to a candidates campaign. They might as well, because the result is 100% the same.